Whilst all France was engaged in preparing for the expedition beyond the seas, the crusade was preached in the other countries of Europe. A council was held at Northampton, in England, in which Ottobon, the pope’s legate, exhorted the faithful to arm themselves to save the little that remained of the kingdom of Jerusalem; and Prince Edward took the cross, to discharge the vow that his father Henry III. had made when the news reached Europe of the captivity of Louis IX. in Egypt. After the example of Edward, his brother Prince Edmund, with the earls of Pembroke and Warwick, and many knights and barons, agreed to take arms against the infidels. The same zeal for the deliverance of the holy places was manifested in Scotland, where John Baliol and several nobles enrolled themselves under the banners of the cross.
Catalonia and Castile furnished a great number of Crusaders: the king of Portugal, and James, king of Arragon, took the cross. Dona Sancha, one of the daughters of the Arragonese prince, had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and had died in the hospital of St. John, after devoting many years to the service of pilgrims and the sick. James had several times conquered the Moors; but neither his exploits against the infidels, nor the remembrance of a daughter who had fallen a martyr to Christian charity, could sustain his piety against the attacks of his earthly passions, and his shameful connection with Berengaria scandalized Christendom.
The pope, to whom he communicated his design of going to the Holy Land, replied that Jesus Christ could not accept the services of a prince who crucified him every day by his sins. The king of Arragon, by a strange combination of opposite sentiments, would neither renounce Berengaria nor give up his project of going to fight against the infidels in the East. He renewed his oath in a great assembly at Toledo, at which the ambassadors of the khan of Tartary and of the king of Armenia were present. We read in a Spanish dissertation[26] upon the crusades, that Alphonso the Wise, who was not able to go to the East himself, furnished the king of Arragon with a hundred men and a hundred thousand marvedis in gold; the order of St. James, and other orders of knighthood, who had often accompanied the conqueror of the Moors in his battles, supplied him also with men and money. The city of Barcelona offered him eighty thousand Barcellonese sols, and Majorca fifty thousand silver sols, with two equipped vessels. The fleet, composed of thirty large ships and a great number of smaller craft, in which were embarked eight hundred men-at-arms and two thousand foot-soldiers, set out from Barcelona on the 4th of September, 1268. When they arrived off Majorca, the fleet was dispersed by a tempest; one part of the vessels gained the coasts of Asia, another took shelter in the ports of Sardinia; the vessel the king of Arragon was on board of was cast upon the coast of Languedoc.
The arrival at Ptolemaïs of the Arragonese Crusaders, commanded by a natural son of James, restored some hopes to the Franks of Palestine. An envoy from the king of Arragon, according to the Oriental chronicles, repaired to the khan of the Tartars, to announce to him that the Spanish monarch would soon arrive with his army. But whether he was detained by the charms of Berengaria, or whether the tempest that dispersed his fleet made him believe that Heaven was averse to his pilgrimage, James did not arrive. His departure, in which he appeared to despise the counsels of the Holy See, had been severely censured; and his return, which was attributed to his disgraceful passion, met with an equal share of blame. Murmurs likewise arose against the king of Portugal, who had levied the tenths, but did not leave his kingdom.
All those who in Europe took an interest in the crusade had, at this time, their eyes directed towards the kingdom of Naples, where Charles of Anjou was making great preparations to accompany his brother into the East; but this kingdom, recently conquered, was doomed again to be the theatre of a war kindled by vengeance and ambition. There fell out in the states of Naples and Sicily, which had so often changed masters, that which almost always takes place after a revolution: deceived hopes were changed into hatreds: the excesses inseparable from a conquest, the presence of an army proud of its victories, with the too violent government of Charles, animated the people against their new king. Clement IV. thought it his duty to give a timely and salutary warning: “Your kingdom,” he wrote to him, “at first exhausted by the agents of your authority, is now torn by your enemies; thus the caterpillar destroys what has escaped the grasshopper. The kingdom of Sicily and Naples has not been wanting in men to desolate it; where now are they that will defend it?” This letter of the pope announced storms ready to break forth. Many of those who had called Charles to the throne, regretted the house of Swabia, and directed their new hopes towards Conradin, heir of Frederick and of Conrad. This young prince quitted Germany with an army, and advanced towards Italy, strengthening himself in his march with the party of the Ghibellines, and with all those whom the domination of Charles had irritated. All Italy was in flames, and the pope, Charles’s protector, retired to Viterbo, had no defence to afford him, except the thunders of the Church.
Charles of Anjou, however, assembled his troops, and marched out to meet his rival. The two armies met in the plain of St. Valentine, near Aquila; the army of Conradin was cut to pieces, and the young prince fell into the power of the conqueror. Posterity cannot pardon Charles for having abused his victory even so far as to condemn and decapitate his disarmed and vanquished enemy.[27] After this execution, Sicily and the country of Naples were given up to all the furies of a jealous, suspicious tyranny; for violence produces violence, and great political crimes never come alone. It was thus that Charles got ready for the crusade; but, on the other hand, Providence was preparing terrible catastrophes for him: “So true it is,” says an historian, “that God as often gives kingdoms to punish those he elevates, as to chastise those whom he brings low.”
Whilst these bloody scenes were passing in Italy, Louis IX. was following up the establishment of public peace and his darling object, the crusade, at the same time. The holy monarch did not forget that the surest manner of softening the evils of war, as well as of his absence, was to make good laws; he therefore issued several ordinances, and each of these ordinances was a monument of his justice. The most celebrated of all is the Pragmatic Sanction, which Bossuet called the firmest support of Gallican liberties. He also employed himself in elevating that monument of legislation which illustrated his reign, and which became a light for following ages.
The count of Poictiers, who was to accompany his brother, was in the mean time engaged in pacifying his provinces, and established many regulations for maintaining public order. He, above everything, endeavoured to abolish slavery; having for a maxim, “That men are born free, and it is always wise to bring back things to their origin.” This good prince drew upon himself the benedictions of his people; and the love of his vassals assured the duration of the laws he made.
We have said that Prince Edward, son of Henry III., had taken the oath to combat the infidels. He had recently displayed a brilliant valour in the civil war that had so long desolated England; and the deliverance of his father and the pacification of the kingdom had been the reward of his exploits. It was his esteem for the character of Louis IX., more than the spirit of devotion, that induced him to set out for the East. The king of France, who himself exhorted him to take the cross, lent him seventy thousand livres tournois for the preparations for his voyage. Edward was to follow Louis as his vassal, and to conduct under his banners the English Crusaders, united with those of Guienne. Gaston de Béarn, to whom the French monarch advanced the sum of twenty-five thousand livres, prepared to follow Prince Edward to the Holy Land.
The period fixed upon for the departure of the expedition was drawing near. By order of the legate, the curés in every parish had taken the names of the Crusaders, in order to oblige them to wear the cross publicly, and all had notice to hold themselves in readiness to embark in the month of May, 1270. Louis confided the administration of his kingdom, during his absence, to Matthew, abbot of St. Denis, and to Simon, sieur de Nesle; he wrote to all the nobles who were to follow him into the Holy Land, to recommend them to assemble their knights and men-at-arms. As religious enthusiasm was not sufficiently strong to make men forget their worldly interests, many nobles who had taken the cross entertained great fears of being ruined by the holy war, and most of them hesitated to set out. Louis undertook to pay all the expenses of their voyage, and to maintain them at his own cost during the war,—a thing that had not been done in the crusades of Louis VII. or Philip Augustus, in which the ardour of the Crusaders did not allow them to give a thought to their fortunes, or to exercise so much foresight. We have still a valuable monument of this epoch in a charter, by which the king of France stipulates how much he is to pay to a great number of barons and knights during the time the war beyond the seas should last.